Abstraction: Abstraction refers to the process of simplifying complex information by focusing on the essential features while ignoring irrelevant details.
In some ways, I think that cognitive dissonance is perhaps the master mechanism for all of our biases.
I tried to read a book by Festinger, the cognitive bias researcher, a few years ago. It was a collection of little studies that he eventually subsumed under his cognitive dissonance idea. I found the book unsatisfying.
I am not sure that a lot of the people using the term really understood what he was getting at in any case. I may not myself.
My current understanding is that we feel a sense of discomfort when we hold or are exposed to conflicting opinions, and try to minimize that discomofort by trying to harmonize things.
I have come to the conclusion that confirmation-disconformation bias is one aspect of this attempt to keep out the feeling of disomfort. Unfortunately, even being aware of the mechanism, I still operate with the same sorts of biases. I think we all do, and much to our detriment.
I spent a lot of time last year trying, unsuccesfully, to come up with a hierarchchy of cognitive, mental, operations. There were many dozens of terms. There did not seem to be a top and it may be that such classification is a hopeless endeavour.
It seems abstraction and generaliztion are of considerable importance, as are their polarities, concretization and specification (these are real words). Pattern recognition goes hand in hand with these, but some folks take it to be the master mechanisim, as in "the pattern theory of mind."
Dunno myself, I studied different aspects of psychology, and did not look at these big ideas.
Cognitive psychology itself seemed to be concerned with smalle scale issues, just as was Festinger in his studies.
Somehow, researchers have constucted over-arching theories based on these little, idiodsyncratic and often trivial research projects. Kahneman and Tversky won a Nobel prize in economics for doing their odd little experiments on bias.
Cognitive Dissonance
Speaking through my hat here:
In some ways, I think that cognitive dissonance is perhaps the master mechanism for all of our biases.
I tried to read a book by Festinger, the cognitive bias researcher, a few years ago. It was a collection of little studies that he eventually subsumed under his cognitive dissonance idea. I found the book unsatisfying.
I am not sure that a lot of the people using the term really understood what he was getting at in any case. I may not myself.
My current understanding is that we feel a sense of discomfort when we hold or are exposed to conflicting opinions, and try to minimize that discomofort by trying to harmonize things.
I have come to the conclusion that confirmation-disconformation bias is one aspect of this attempt to keep out the feeling of disomfort. Unfortunately, even being aware of the mechanism, I still operate with the same sorts of biases. I think we all do, and much to our detriment.
I spent a lot of time last year trying, unsuccesfully, to come up with a hierarchchy of cognitive, mental, operations. There were many dozens of terms. There did not seem to be a top and it may be that such classification is a hopeless endeavour.
It seems abstraction and generaliztion are of considerable importance, as are their polarities, concretization and specification (these are real words). Pattern recognition goes hand in hand with these, but some folks take it to be the master mechanisim, as in "the pattern theory of mind."
Dunno myself, I studied different aspects of psychology, and did not look at these big ideas.
Cognitive psychology itself seemed to be concerned with smalle scale issues, just as was Festinger in his studies.
Somehow, researchers have constucted over-arching theories based on these little, idiodsyncratic and often trivial research projects. Kahneman and Tversky won a Nobel prize in economics for doing their odd little experiments on bias.